How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare's England

Human beings build their worlds using metaphors. Just as computer technology has inaugurated a massive metaphorical transformation in the present era, in which we can 'reboot' social causes or 'program' human behaviour, books spawned new metaphorical worlds in the newly print-savvy early modern England. Pamphleteers appealed to books to stage political attacks, preachers formulated theological claims using metaphors of page and binding, and scientists claimed to leaf through the 'Book of Nature'. Jonathan P. Lamb shows how, far from offering a mere a linguistic tool, this astonishingly broad lexicon did no less than teach entire cultures how to imagine, giving early modern writers - from Shakespeare to Cavendish, and from the famous to the anonymous - the language to describe and reshape the worlds around them. He reveals how, at a scale beyond anything scholars have imagined, bookish language shaped religious, political, racial, scientific, and literary questions that remain alive today.

List of contents

List of figures; Acknowledgements; A note on texts and citations; Preface; 1. An introduction is like a book; 2. The lexicon of print; 3. The metaphors we read with; 4. Book size and information management; 5. The bookish sensorium; 6. The World is a book; 7. When print was white; Bibliography; Index.

About the author

Jonathan P. Lamb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas and an award-winning scholar and teacher of Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and book history. He is the author of many books and articles, including Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words (2017), and is a leading expert in the use of digital scholarly methods to study literature and culture.

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan P. Lamb
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 30.09.2025
• EAN: 9781009460415
• ISBN: 978-1-009-46041-5
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; European History, Classical texts, Literary studies: general, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Shakespeare Studies & Criticism, European history: Renaissance, Ancient, classical and medieval texts, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, Relating to Shakespeare / Shakespearean